Stop What You’re Doing and Read Lords of the Realm
My first draft of this post, written less than a day after I finished reading John Helyar’s incredible Lords of the Realm tried to recap and summarize the 607 page ‘real history of baseball’. That wasn’t a good plan. It’s too detailed, too nuanced, and there are too many crucial moments I couldn’t justify leaving out. Instead, I want to focus on some of my takeaways from this book, and just tell you that if you haven’t yet read it, you’re doing something wrong.
We are in the midst of Major League Baseball’s first labor stoppage since the infamous 1994 strike, a period of peace in the sport that is actually unprecedented in its length and durability, at least since the rise of MLB Players Association in in the 1960s and 70s. Between 1972 and 1994, baseball lurched though 8(!) work stoppages- in 1972, 1973, 1976, 1980, 1981, 1985, 1990, and 1994, a fact that I probably knew but certainly didn’t appreciate until I finally picked up Lords.
Somewhere in my head I always knew there was a period of time, maybe a long one, where playing baseball wasn’t enough to pay the bills and players were entirely at the mercy of what owners decided to pay them. Somewhere in my head, I also know that Max Scherzer will soon make more than $40 million a year, but I just never connected those dots. My baseball history was something like a swiss cheese: full of holes, but still pretty good.
Lords of the Realm fills in those holes. It’s the history of baseball, but not dramatic home runs and records and pennant chases; it’s the history of the business of baseball, or baseball as a business, and it couldn’t be more relevant for our current moment in time.
In the context revealed to me through Lords, this MLB lockout that started with months to go before spring training, preceded by a flurry of massive, big-money, long term deals right before the deadline, and with the owners’ goal a far cry from ending free agency, or salary arbitration, takes on a different flavor. It seems downright tame by comparison to some of the stoppages that got us the system we currently have.
In fact, the recent spate of teams following the letter of the collective bargaining agreement but flagrantly violating its spirit by, for instance, manipulating the service time of upcoming minor leagues, and the soft collusion of the last few quiet free agent winters is right in step with their past conduct through the decades.
There are a few important differences with where we stand today. First and foremost, the sport has not been through something like this in a long time. While the first few stoppages in the 1970s were the birthing pains of the new, post-‘reserve clause’ galactic order, the later stoppages were the result of attempts on both the side of owners and the MLB Players Association to adjust the system and refine it. In a sense, the last two decades of labor peace has been less a golden age than a ceasefire in the wake of the ruinous 1994 strike, where tensions and fundamental issues have slowly ratcheted up, and the pressure along the fault line seems poised to be released all at once in a cataclysmic earthquake.
Another important distinction about today’s circumstances relative to the past is union leadership. After reading Lords it’s impossible to come away without a deep appreciation for Marvin Miller, who built the MLBPA from nothing into the most powerful and successful union in America. Miller turned his members from part time plumbers to multi-millionaires. One of the follies that the owners continued to make over the decades of negotiating with Miller was appointing counterparts to him that lacked labor experience and didn’t understand broader context that Miller was operating under or the particular nuances of these unique negotiations.
Today, the head of the MLBPA is a former player, Tony Clark, and his history in the role since 2013 does not inspire confidence that the players are represented by competent and thoughtful leadership. Apparently recognizing this distinction, the Union hired a chief negotiator in 2019.
Rob Manfred, on the other hand, is not nearly as unique as I thought. Before reading this book, I regarded Manfred as a singularly malevolent force in baseball- myopic beyond belief and committed to extracting the next dollar out of the game today at the expense of the sport in the years to come.
In reality, he’s just the latest in a long boring line of poor stewards of the sport, less Bart Giamatti, who was a baseball lover but ill-suited for the role of commissioner, than Peter Uberroth, a hired gun who considered baseball just a business like any other and who was brought on to right the economic ship at all costs (and who, coincidentally, presided over the 1980s-era collusion that was one of baseball’s most embarrassing episodes).
No, Manfred isn’t unique at all, he just looks that way in comparison to someone like Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, who has shepherded his sport past baseball in popularity and has become a figure respected by fans, players, and owners- someone who has earned confidence in his guidance of basketball into the future. Baseball has simply never had a commissioner anything like Silver. After reading Lords, I really hope one day it does.
Like Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, Lords of the Realm should be required reading for any baseball fan. As a super-fan (my fiance uses words like ‘obsessive’), former college player, and founder, writer, and editor of this site for now more than a decade (editor’s note: what.), I consider myself to be in something like the 99th percentile of people with baseball knowledge. My eyes were really opened by this book. Aside from being chock full of fascinating anecdotes about the heyday of baseball and serving as an incredible resource for stories of the people and personalities that created the game that we have today, Lords provides the necessary context to truly understand where stand at this moment and why the game has the problems it does.
The book is a dense 607 pages (at least the version I have, which includes a “new” update on the 1994 strike!) but I couldn’t put it down. The story of Miller and the hard-fought birth of the union, creating the transformation of baseball from what it was in the days of Branch Rickey and the Brooklyn Dodgers into what it is today is so compelling. I also think that I went in with the perfect amount of prior knowledge- familiar with all the names and the vague outlines of the big, future-shaping stories, but ignorant of the details and excited to keep turning the pages to find them out. It’s really unacceptable that it took me this long to get to ‘the real history of baseball.’ I can’t recommend it more highly, and now seems like as good a time as any to dive in.
